Time ripe to adopt national plan to combat gender-violence
TWO young women walking home from work in Observatory at 6.30pm on the eve of Youth Day 2017 – attacked at gunpoint by two men. Lots of people on the street watching on but no one intervenes.
The women screams and fights back when the men try to pull off their clothes. The men flee in a white Golf. Two high school girls dropped off at Nyanja Station after their weekly Rock Girl meeting last month are attacked by a group of men as they walk home.
The girls run for it and escape into the home of a neighbour. The men run away. A Grade 11 Rock Girl walking to school in Elsie’s River, her father by her side.
Three men pounce from behind, armed with knives, and take her school bag and her fathers’ wallet before fleeing.
A 50-year-old mother of two asleep in her bed in Llandudno pulled out of bed and held at knifepoint with her 12-yearold daughter and husband while her son hides downstairs.
The men demand money, jewellery and want to take the woman and her daughter to another room.
After half an hour of negotiations, the men lock them in a bedroom and flee.
These girls and women are considered the lucky ones because they escaped. They weren’t raped or killed. They weren’t maimed or wounded. For that, they are all grateful. Too many others don’t survive these attacks unscathed.
We know their names, their faces from the front pages of our newspapers.
But the girls and women who do survive aren’t lucky – they are fortunate and luckier, but it is never lucky to be threatened with violence… It wasn’t “their turn”. It should never be someone’s turn to be a victim of crime.
No matter where you live or what precautions you take, as a girl and woman in South Africa you know that you might be attacked, raped, killed. But this should not be our reality. Rock Girl, along with many others across South Africa has been working for years to advocate for a safer country, for communities where people don’t huddle under their blankets, afraid their home will be invaded and their lives threatened. The inequality in South Africa is real – so many people have so little while a few have so much.
But the raw violence that accompanies all these attacks, the physicality of them, the brutality, has nothing to do with inequality.
These acts are cruel, inhumane and heartless.
The man accused of raping and killing Franciska Blöchliger testified in court that he was overcome by an evil spirit. It is time, as a country, to acknowledge that there are too many evil spirits – who will continue to destroy our girls and women.
Our mothers and daughters and sisters, our future, are at risk unless we unite to all fight back and demand that the government put the resources behind all efforts to stop the continued assaults on our bodies and souls.
President Zuma, Members of Parliament, this June adopt the national plan to address gender-based violence. Make this your legacy for South Africa’s youth. India Baird Rock Girl founder